Electronic Publishing: Beethoven Meets the Klingons

Beginning of article

You have to give Bill Gates credit. The Microsoft supremo may have been caught unawares by the Internet, but he caught on to multimedia at just the right time.

Microsoft was one of the first companies to produce a range of "infotainment" titles on CD-Rom. Infotainment is a new category of software that combines information with entertaining multimedia features such as sound and video.

Its first titles were studies of Mozart and Beethoven that contained music clips, text and illustrations. These sold well but they were a bit dull.

A British company called Media Design Interactivehelped to point the way forward for infotainment software when it published …